American Feudalism

I got up early this morning to deal with the little boy, and one of the first things I saw was Ferdinand’s post this morning on Generation Zero. Where to start? It’s a bit wandering, almost stream of consciousness, but for all that, it’s a powerful piece. At least it was for me, but maybe that’s because I really feel like I’m in the same place right now. I could get a dozen posts, easily, off of the points he touches on – it hits me that deep. Every section hits me hard, beginning with the quote from Fight Club – one of my favorite movies because of how deeply it spoke to me. Yes, I’m well aware that that statement just might be an indication that I’m clinically disturbed.

Two sentences in particular really struck home today, though, because it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

America is no different than European countries where success is determined by your last name and your class. Except that while Europeans acknowledge their reality, Americans cover theirs in a blanket of pious Puritan lies.

Welcome to the 21st century, land of the Internet, electric cars, and the great American Feudalism.

You see, there’s truth still to the idea that a college education is essential to succeed in today’s society. Just not the kind of truth the peddlers of higher education claim. A college degree is the modern equivalent of a medieval knighthood. Without it, you’re nobody – just a peasant, doomed to work the fields forever. With it, you reach the very bottom rungs of the modern feudal system. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, you have a foot in the door toward something better. You have more rights than your degreeless peers, de facto if not de jur. A whole class of better jobs, and a whole better life, is walled off from you if you don’t have one.

But like a knighthood, the degree is not enough. Yes, you’re technically one level above “commoner” now. But just like that knight, if you don’t have the connections and the network to land you employment in the service of a Lord a “good job,” you’re out of luck. You’ll spend your life wandering, selling your fighting services burgers wherever you can.

Take away all the creature comforts and our modern world is little different than the Feudal societies we’re taught in grade school that we’re so much better than. We just disguise it better.

Teachers Are Not Underpaid

Can we stop already with the canard that teachers are underpaid? It’s one of those “facts” that’s tossed around all the time and has completely ceased to be true. I’m willing to concede that once upon a time it probably was true. I don’t have the data at my fingertips, but based upon my recollections of my childhood (admittedly fuzzy and vague), it seems like it was true at the time. It’s not now, and that’s not fuzzy and vague. I’m going to let the numbers back me up.

Thanks to the US Census Bureau, we have quite a bit of information about individual and family incomes across the US. Wikipedia helpfully collected the relevant information for us in two helpful pages (Household Income and Personal Income) that are far easier to read than the actual Census Bureau reports, so we’ll start there. Also, I’ve grabbed the actual salary chart from Fulton County Schools in Georgia. Why Fulton County? I don’t live there, but I’ve spent enough time in Atlanta (which sprawls across four counties) to know that Fulton County is basically the poor and (dare I say it) minority part of the city. It seemed like a good representative of not necessarily the richest school district in the country. The actual teacher salary info will vary depending on your locale, but it should be public information. Track down the salary charts for your areas and play along at home. If I were feeling more industrious I’d track down actual median salary data for teachers, but this is good enough to illustrate the point.

Before we begin, I’ll go ahead and point out that the Census data is from 2009 (the latest year we have it for) and the teacher salary chart is from the 2010-2011 school year, so it’s not quite a perfect match. It’s close enough, however, for anything shy of an actual academic paper.

Data point number one: the median income of all individuals over the age of 25 for 2009 was $32,140. This seems like a fair starting point, since we’re not really interested in comparing teacher salaries with high school students who are working part time for spending money. It also cuts out the college age group. Much of this group is in college and not working, and those that aren’t in college at this age typically have crappy income. So we’ve already filtered out a lot of the lowest individual incomes, which has the effect of pushing the median way up.

Looking at the teacher salary chart, we see that starting pay fresh out of college with no experience is $39,132 a year. That’s right – a 22 year old college grad just entering the market in this field makes more money than 50% of his fellow American workers. Twenty percent more. Take a look at the other end of the chart and we see that a teacher with 26 years of experience (so someone in his or her late 40s, typically) is making $62,59 even without adding any additional schooling. You have to add up the percentages in the income distribution table to calculate it, but that puts that teacher at the eighty fifth percentile for income. In other words, that teacher makes more than 85% of his fellow American workers.

Let’s make another, more striking comparison. Looking at the household incomes numbers, we see that a fresh Master’s Degree graduate with no experience makes $43,44, which almost puts puts him on par with the national median household income of $44,389. Don’t want to bother getting a Master’s Degree? No problem, you can still reach that point by the time you’re 30 just by getting 8 years of experience. In other words, at each of these points our hypothetical teacher now earns more money all on his own than 50% of all American families, including those with 2 or more workers. If our Master’s Degree student continues working there for 26 years (again, that’s only until his mid 40s), his individual income will now exceed more than 80% (closer to 85%, but not quite) of all American households.

At what point along the scale, exactly, are our teachers underpaid? And if you still want to argue that they are, then tell me, exactly how much should they be paid? More than 90% of our fellow workers? 99%? Should each and every teacher be paid executive level salaries?

Teachers are paid just fine. Sure, they feel the pinch, just like the rest of us. And just like the rest of us, they want better pay whenever and wherever and however they can get it. Also, they’ve told each other for their entire working careers that they’re underpaid, so when they feel the middle class pinch, it just seems like it must be true that they’re underpaid.

On top of all that, 70% of the teachers I ever had in the public school system were completely worthless. Even a typical student would’ve been just as well off without them. Another 25% or so were almost worthless. Typical students might have been a bit better off with them than without, but gifted students would’ve been better off on their own again. Only about 5% of the teachers I ever had would I call actually worth my while. Our public schools are so bad that I’d sell body parts if I had to (literally) to keep my kids out of them. So again, how exactly are these people underpaid? We pay pretty decent salaries to a group of people who can’t be fired and who get an ass load of vacation time. Don’t start with me about the hours they put in after school; I’ll make a detailed rundown of the number of hours I’ve worked in the last two years and show exactly why I have NO sympathy whatsoever. It’s called a job. You get paid to do stuff that sucks. If it was fun, they wouldn’t have to pay you to do it.

Next time you hear a politician tell you that it’s necessary to raise your taxes to pay for the schools and our poor underpaid teachers, remember that it’s all bullshit. It’s just one more very powerful special interest group looking out for themselves.

The Problem With Career Oriented Feminism

Alte has a good post up about homemakers today that reminded me of a thought I’ve had for a long time. For those who haven’t read any of my earlier posts, my extended family is pretty strongly feminist. My sister would qualify as the “feminist man-hating lesbian” stereotype except that I don’t actually think she’s a lesbian – just a very, very unhappy woman because no man exists in the real world who is both a) high status enough for her and b) would put up with her bullshit.

Anyway, back to the point. One of the main pushes of modern feminism is the idea that women should have careers and should be pushed into work roles that are traditionally or historically male. They often won’t come out and say it, but there’s a strong undertone from feminists that stay-at-home-moms aren’t acceptable – that they’re holding back the sisterhood. My mother, the only one of four sisters who chose to be a SAHM definitely felt this throughout our childhood, and spoke up about it on occasion. I’ve seen a lot of other SAHMs voice the same feeling, and I’ve seen a lot of men frustrated because their career oriented wives are causing family issues (as Alte points out, there are also a lot of men these days who view even the hard working SAHMs as free riders).

Alte correctly points out that part of the problem is that we, collectively as a culture, no longer value anything that can’t be monetized. I’ve hashed this out with friends and family before. I’ve made some pretty unorthodox choices in my life because of my firm belief that there are lots of things with what economists call “non-monetary value.” In other words, there are things in life that you can’t really put a price tag on in terms of dollars but that nevertheless are very, very valuable.

There’s another angle, however, that’s just as insidious. Modern feminism’s take on this issue started from completely the wrong point. They noted, probably somewhat correctly (if we’re honest with ourselves), that women homemakers were underappreciated and sometimes lacking in rights. They set about “fixing” the problem in entirely the wrong way, however. By trying to convince other women that they should have careers, and convincing men that they should be allowed to, they implicitly bought into the very notion that they were trying to fight: the idea that “women’s work” was somehow demeaning and beneath anybody to do. Our culture has now accepted a stance that raising children and managing a household is low-status work. This is partly because it’s not monetized, as Alte points out, and partly because we’ve been culturally taught that no woman should be forced to be “stuck there.” OK, sure, nobody should have to do it if it’s not what they’re great at. But it shouldn’t be looked down upon the same way it subconsciously (or consciously by some) is now.

The result is that we have men stuck in careers as they have been for a century or more, and now we have women stuck in careers too, and nobody is raising the kids because everybody’s too busy doing “important” work. As a consequence, we have half a generation that essentially was never raised. They just kind of grew up on their own. Not a very great place for our culture to be.

If feminists had taken the correct choice and made a point of demonstrating that such work was of equal value (despite its lack of monetization) to “men’s work” then we could conceivably be instead in a situation where it’s acceptable for men to do that work as well, and it would be a lot more common for one parent to maintain their focus on raising the children. I do believe that part of the reason there are so few stay at home dad’s is because men biologically aren’t as fond of child rearing as women. But I still think we’d have more of it if being a stay at home parent was viewed as a higher status, more socially acceptable role. Instead, our culture largely views it as a low status position. Women, therefore, want to get out of it if they can, and their hypergamous instincts push them away from relationships where their husbands do it.

Don’t Cry in Front of Her

To continue a point I briefly touched on in my last post, contrary to the touchy-feely “wisdom” of our culture there are very few situations where it’s actually OK for a man to cry in front of his woman. It’s not that men can’t be emotional, but as Simon Grey commented in that post, part of the manly role is to be the rock in the relationship. Crying in front of her blows that role. You should avoid it – especially if it has to do with your relationship. Find a hetero male life friend or cry it out alone. It sucks, I know. It’s one of the double standards of biology. The thing feminists don’t get with all their cries of double standards is that not all of them favor men. A lot of them really, really suck for us. This can be one of them. We’re people too, and we have feelings. But, ahem, be a man about it. Not because you should for any moral reason, but because the people around you (especially your woman) really will think less of you, even if they try not to.

As with any rule, there are a few exceptions. There are times when it’s OK to cry.

• When a family member or close friend dies.
• When witnessing acts of supreme courage and/or heroism.
• When your car dies, but only if it’s a classic, your first car, or a car you’ve strongly bonded with.
• When your dog dies, but not for any other kind of pet. Sorry cat lovers. Nothing against them, but they’re not manly.
• In a select few manly moments of movies: the opening scenes of Up, when Arnold gives the thumbs as he goes into the lava pit in Terminator 2, the “Freedom!” moment in Braveheart, and when the Giant goes to save the day in The Iron Giant. Oh, and when they shoot Old Yeller (see the previous note). There are a handful of others, but not many

Remember, though, that all of these moments except for the first still call for manly tears (and maybe that bit in The Iron Giant, it’s killer), not crying like a little bitch.

5 Things I Hate About How Women Fight

This post is a riff on this article that I stumbled on through CNN’s front page this evening. Italics are mine. Everything else is copy/pasted from the original article.

1.Sometimes men just don’t want to talk women just won’t shut up. It’s an old saw that men don’t see the point of discussing a problem unless there is something they can do immediately to solve itdon’t like to listen to whining. I have certainly seen that to be true in my own life, both with male friends and boyfriends.

The thing I will never understand about men women until the day I die is why some of them struggle to understand that talking about a problem very often makes the problem go awaymakes the problem grow – or worse, creates a problem where there really wasn’t one to begin with. A lot of women feel better after an uncomfortable conversation, not worse men feel worse after an uncomfortable conversation, not better. Yet, a lot of guysgirls think talking is “doing nothing” and that if there’s nothing he can “do,” there’s no point dwelling on the matterdoing something constructive, even though they’re really just creating drama where none exists.

But she may not need him to take action. In fact, she is a biglittle girl and can solve the problem herselfjust wants some drama in her life. She just wants to whinesomeone to lean on, a shoulder to cry on, or someone to bounce ideas off of. If there is one piece of advice I could give to menwomen the world over it would be: learn to listenshut up.

2. Sometimes, a woman’s uses tears to really scare a man and/or make him defensive. One of the most messed-up things about how our culture socializes boys is that they are taught it’s not OK to cry. Crying is seen as a sign of weakness. I know men do cry — or at the very least, tear up during “Up”  – but I’ve never seen a man (other than Rep. John Boehner) be as openly tearfulturn to tears as a weaponas much as your average woman. Crying is used as the “get out of jail free” card for women: ie, they turn on the tears and expect to automatically win the fight. No matter the justness of his cause, a man who continues to fight against a woman’s tears is automatically defined by our society as an “asshole.”

As a result, it’s my opinion that men don’t always know what to do when they see tears. Some seem scared by tears, like she’s a vat of nuclear waste overflowing. Others seem to get defensive, like tears are bullets hurled at them. Tears are neitherboth. They are just tears and they just represent sadness, frustration, humiliation or anger. That’s all.The only response is to maintain your cool, alpha calm. Her tears cannot be used as a weapon against you.

3. Sometimes it seems like they dig throw us in a hole and keep digging and digging – instead of just saying, expecting us to say “That was wrong. I’m sorry,” when neither is true. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard came from my friend Andrew, who told me, “Never change a winning game.” He meant that if things are going well for you then you shouldn’t tinker with it and instead figure out how you came to win.

The converse, obviously, is also true: you should change a losing game. But I’ve argued with many menwomen in my day and too many of them kept forcing me into playing a losing game. For instance, no matter how constructive you try to be in your response, it is always reframed against you. You, the supportive one, become the jerk for some totally retarded reason that has nothing to do with anything that’s actually happening on planet Earth.One long-distance ex-boyfriend used to hang up the phone on me when we fought, despite my telling him that it was totally unacceptable. But you know what? He kept doing it.[Ed - note the super alpha move here, and that by her own inadvertent admission she kept coming back for more.]

Other guys have continued to do bad stuff — judging me, ignoring me, etc. — even though I made it clear to them it was wrong.[Ed - she continues to inadvertently show that she responds to the alpha.] I don’t know if it’s an inability to admit they’renothing is actually wrong, or what, but this drives me nuts.

4. How any variation of “You’re just being too emotional/crazy/unreasonable/etc.” is apparently not a fair argument even when she really is being too emotional/crazy/unreasonable/etc. Oh, yes. The lovely “You’re just being crazyinsensitive!” trump card.

Don’t get me wrong: I know at least one woman who is certifiably crazy and several who are unreasonable. Surely, there are tons of others out there. But most guys are not dating these women — they just think they are aren’t — and they don’t throw around words like “crazy,” “unreasonable” or “too emotional” in a cavalier way anywhere near as often as they should.

The reality is that telling a woman she’s crazy or PMSing is dismissive and no guy gets to be the arbiter of a woman’s emotionsthe 100% correct response when she’s crazy or PMSing. That’s judgmental and it’s wrong, perhaps, but it also happens to be true. As much as I hate to admit my high school health class teacher was right, the advice she gave us to always use “I feel … ” statements while arguing was spot-on. is a good way to ensure that the argument has no actual content, and to allow women to have the upper hand in the argument no matter what. Telling a woman she’s crazy or over-emotional willmightaccomplish nothing, other than make her feel judged and make you look like a jerk, but at least the truth is where it needs to be.

5.Waking up the next morning and pretending nothing happened is not a resolution very often an effective technique. This goes back to item No. 1. Uncomfortable conversations don’t always have to be had. Going to bed angry doesn’t mean that the next morning all’s well againcan be very useful when she’s being crazy. Especially if she’s just PMSing and going crazy about something that isn’t an actual problem. Let her sleep it off. In the morning, she won’t even know why she was so upset about it.

Many women, myself included, can’t ignore bad arguments or harsh words that have been exchanged — especially not indefinitely. This is a good reason not to exchange them. Go to bed and let the crazy wear off overnight. There’s a difference between taking a day (or a week, or whatever) to collect yourself and have a conversation when everyone has calmed down and putting off an uncomfortable conversation indefinitely. But if she’s just being over-emotional, put it off until morning. Trust me on this one.

Please note: the tone of my edits is a little more directly confrontational than I usually am on this blog. It is entirely as a response to the confrontational and childish tone of Ms Wakeman’s original post.

Look, men and women argue differently. Anybody who’s ever been in a serious long term relationship knows this. The arrogance and hubris of this article is to assume that a woman’s way of doing it is the right one and that men are defective for not getting it. Note that there’s never once any consideration of meeting the men halfway and trying to come at an argument from our point of view – only the complaint that we’re broken because we don’t work like women.

This is also a classic case of women telling you what they think they want rather than what they actually want. It pisses me off because this is exactly the kind of bullshit that always caused me relationship problems. When I tried treating my wife the way Ms Wakeman describes, our relationship was terrible. It’s not what she wanted at all. Note her own admissions in the article itself: does she talk about any of the sensitive guys out there who actually bothered listening to her? No, because they got shunted into LJBF territory and forgotten. The ones she remembers are the alpha bad boys who hung up on her (super alpha), judged her (probably not the best move), and ignored her (a solid play, but better with a good reframe or at least a redirection first).

There are lots and lots of guys out there who behave exactly as Ms. Wakeman requests. Solid guys. Nice guys. Decent guys. Guys who aren’t getting laid. I know – I was one of them for a very long time. And the thing is, the women I treated that way weren’t happy. Despite anything they said, they didn’t actually like it.

Lest this whole rant come off wrong, my wife was never anywhere near as bad as the tone of my edits may suggest. But she’s a woman. She’s a lot more emotional in her reactions to day to day life than I am. Back in the day, we used to have many, many sleepless nights that went something like this:

Me: Is something wrong? [It is, and I can tell.]
Hermione: No, not really. [Lying.]
Me: What is it?
Hermione: No really, it’s nothing. [It's bugging the shit out of her, and I'm picking up on her body language - hence it's now bugging the shit out of me, while we're lying here in bed and I'm trying to sleep.]
Me: No really, what is it?
Hermione: It’s late. [And not getting any earlier. I've already figured out I'm not getting laid tonight - can we get through this already so I can go to sleep?]
Me: What is it?
Hermione:Diatribe on whatever’s bothering her. Usually it’s something minor and somewhat random (at least to a guy), like “do you think so and so hates me?” or “I just feel bad because of something random.” An hour or two of conversation ensues. We went to bed kind of late to begin with. Now it’s really late.
Me: Maybe you can do such and such about it – or – no, really, there’s nothing there – or – no, they like you just fine. Yadda yadda yadda.

To anybody with an ounce of knowledge of Game, it should be pretty clear that this just left both of us extremely frustrated – not to mention tired and grumpy the next day. You know what else? I know that according to feminists and whatnot we’re not supposed to mention it, but this kind of thing was about 100 times more likely to happen around her period. Oh, what’s that? A bunch of hormones are hitting and fucking with your emotions? No, it couldn’t possibly be that.

Or it really is that, and the appropriate thing to do is to find out she’s feeling upset, give her a little hug, tell her we’ll talk about it in the morning if she’s not feeling better, and go to sleep. And you know what? 90% of the time she’s feeling better in the morning, because she’s just being over-emotional while she’s PMSing.

Yes, it’s very important to be able to tell the difference between her just PMSing and when there’s an actual problem. Actual problems need to be dealt with, although 90% of them can still wait until morning when everybody’s less tired/grumpy/hormonal. But here’s the thing: if she wants to be treated like a “big girl”, then she needs to also learn to recognize when she’s just PMSing. Thank god almighty that I have a wife who is at least able to comprehend that fact, even during the event itself. These days, conversations often go like this:

Me: What’s wrong?
Hermione:Brief overview of the problem.
Me: [Recognizing that she's being over-emotional] Ah. Sorry that’s bothering you. [Hug] Maybe we should sleep on it. I bet you’ll feel better in the morning. And I mean this in a nice way, but you’re probably overreacting a little because your hormones are going wacky at this time of the month.
Hermione: Yeah, at least I can admit that.
[Sleep ensues; in the morning, it's not even an issue.]

OH MY GOD this way is so much better. Let’s count the ways:

1. EVERYBODY GETS SOME SLEEP
2. No awkward conversation where I’m trying to be supportive and yet it somehow turns into a fight.
3. EVERYBODY GETS SOME SLEEP
4. Non-problems don’t get elevated into the status of real problems.
5. EVERYBODY GETS SOME SLEEP
6. I may not come off as super alpha, but I don’t come off looking like a beta boy either. My wife’s vagina isn’t snapping tight anymore. She’s not getting frustrated at my betaness anymore, and I’m getting a whole lot less frustrated over that vagina that’s no longer snapped tight.
7. EVERYBODY GETS SOME SLEEP

Everybody wins. The moral of the story, kids, is one we’ve learned at this blog over and over and over again: don’t listen to women when they tell you what they want. Watch, instead, how they react to what you do.

 

Send Out the Men

As long time readers know, I live in the southeast, which just got hit by a major snowstorm.  In the particular area I live in, this is the third highest snowfall on record and the highest since 1988 (23 years). The snow came in Sunday evening, and everything’s been pretty much shut down since then. Yes, you Yankees and other northerners will laugh at us for being unprepared. But really, it doesn’t make sense to be much more prepared than we are. We get snow enough to close roads about once every 5 years or so, it’s really just not worth the cost to be prepared for that. It’s easier and more efficient to just give everybody a holiday for a few days while we get the streets cleaned up.

As of this afternoon, most of the major roads have been plowed off and reopened. A lot of the back roads are still a mess, but if you can carefully make your way out of that, everything’s fine. I discovered this when I left this afternoon to go grocery shopping. We debated making a trip Sunday afternoon, but I made the wrong call. I seriously underestimated how much food we had in the house (I thought our last shopping trip had been much more recent than it actually turned out to be). Anyway, I made the trip solo today. We didn’t really know how the roads were, and I felt better leaving the kid at home until we knew. Also, my wife and I agreed that I had a lot more experience driving in the snow than she did, so it was probably safer that way.

Interesting note: at the grocery store today, it was about 80-90% men, and most of the women were there with men. Typically, as most of you have probably noticed, the ratio is more like 60-70% women at the grocery store, or closer to 50-50 in areas that are heavy on the singles (like college towns).

I’m not saying I think this is a problem. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective it makes an awful lot of sense. I only note that even in our modern, “progressive” society, when we need something done that we perceive as dangerous we send out the men.

Alpha Move of the Night

Move the big f–ing desk on your own. I’m talking about the ridiculously heavy one that even the movers had trouble with.

The Internet

Once upon a time, in the Good Ol’ Days we refer to as the 1990s, this newfangled thing called The Internet made a jump from an obscure tool that only academics and computer geeks even knew about to a mainstream tool that everybody was using. The world was full of promise. The Internet would set us free! Information wants to be free! You can’t control the ‘Net! Finally we have an end to all censorship! Power to the little man!

I got caught up in it pretty easily. After all, I was young. I had Internet access in high school, a few years before it was really known to the public. It was just the right age to get caught up in all the libertarian utopian ideas of how great the Internet would be.

I’ve spent my whole adult life working with computers, and in recent years I’ve come to an entirely different conclusion. In the long run, the Internet will lessen our freedoms, not increase them. Yes, the Internet of yesteryear was a wild, wild west where anything went. The Internet of today is already being tamed, and the Internet of tomorrow is going to trend toward fascist land. Here are some things we can expect in the future of the Internet, many of which are already here or coming:

• DRM will fundamentally limit our usage of any and all media. “Fair use” exceptions that we take for granted today will be technologically unavailable. Sure, a handful of people will be able to crack the system and get past it. 99.9% of the people won’t know how or care to learn. Increasingly harsh laws (worldwide) will be in place to enable this and to crack down on the folks who try to circumvent it – laws pushed by gigantic Mega Corporations. This is already starting to happen thanks to DMCA, and there’s an ongoing push for even more draconian world wide copyright treaties.
• Our digital devices will increasingly be used to track everything we do. This is already happening to a huge degree. Use web mail? It’s free and convenient, and I use it myself. But your mail’s being tracked. Google’s already tracking it digitally so that they know what ads to send you. Other companies are doing similar things with it. That handy dandy GPS in your phone? It can be used to track you, too. Those internet sites your browsing that helpfully remember your information? They’re using web “cookies” to track what you do.
• Watch out for free speech limitations. We’ve already seen it with sites like In Mala Fide and others being threatened with de-hosting or more for “hate speech.” The DMCA requires sites to take down content on the mere accusation of copyright violation, and we’ve watched that happen as well.
• Think Wikileaks is a bastion of freedom that proves the Internet can’t be tamed? Think again. Wikileaks will, over the next 5 years, be the driving force that gives governments around the world the excuse they need to tighten down the reigns on the Internet. Remember this, kids: there is nothing fundamental about the Internet that makes it immune from censorship or government control. It exists this way today because it was designed and built that way. Designs and construction can change. If the laws force them to, the big companies that control most of the Internet can and will change those protocols that make the Internet so hard to control. Many of those companies will do so gladly, because it will improve their bottom line. Some of those companies will even lobby governments in favor of these kinds of regulation.
• Very little that you do online ever goes away, and most of what you post – the content that you create – is no longer yours from the minute you post it online. Major web sites like Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress.com (who hosts this blog) rarely delete anything, even if you “delete” content. They can’t. Federal law requires them to keep that content around for a minimum of 30 days so that the police can subpoena it for an investigation. Some sites will actually delete content after 30 days. More and more are moving to policies of never deleting anything. Hard drives are cheap. Having to tell the government that you don’t have what they want might kill your business.
• Nothing is truly private online. Anything you post online could potentially become public. There are hackers out there who would love to make your private, locked LiveJournal posts public. Not because they care that you told off your boss or fucked your girlfriend’s roommate. They don’t give a shit about you. They’d just love to hack LiveJournal for the hell of it. Or big corporations like Facebook might decide, “Nah, we don’t give a crap about our so-called-privacy policy anymore. Let’s sell everybody’s data to the highest bidder.” Think it can’t happen? It already has. How do you think your phone number or e-mail address ended up in the hands of so many telemarketers and spammers? Failing all of that, governments around the world can just demand the data anyway. In the US we have this little thing called the 4th amendment that requires due process in order to do such a search or seizure. But what about in other countries? Some companies, like Google, have gone to bat for the little guy to protect their rights against foreign governments. Many more companies haven’t. And when it starts to seriously impact Google’s profits, you’d better believe they’ll fall in line like everybody else.

The world is changing, my friends. And not to the digital utopia we all thought it would be. The only reason it hasn’t happened already is that the Internet originated in the United States, a country that still has some serious constitutional protections for free speech, free assembly, free press, and freedom from search and seizure. Other countries have been trying for a decade to remove Internet control from the US government’s hands. And how long will the US government and its people retain the will to maintain these freedoms? If history is any judge the answer is certainly, “not forever.” Indeed, we’ve already witnessed the willingness of our fellow citizens to give up all kinds of freedoms in the name of “security,” “health care,” and “safety” – nevermind the almighty “profit.”

My vision of the future is not inevitable. It can be stopped. But only if the people have the will to stop it. I’m no longer convinced they do.

Contrast

One of my friends has a new girlfriend. He’s a super nice guy. Honestly a nice guy, not a “nice guy” in the LJBF sense. The problem is, to the vagina they are one and the same thing. He’s a wonderful case study of this exact phenomenon, as every relationship he’s had since I’ve known him has basically ended after his nice guy routine snapped his then-current girlfriend’s vagina shut.

The other day we got an e-mail from a different friend sent to a large group inviting folks to an activity. Friend A’s response was that he couldn’t come because he had to work a shift in place of his sick girlfriend (they work at the same place). My wife told me it was a very whipped thing for him to do.

I got to thinking about it myself and I’m of a slightly different opinion. The thing that came to mind is Dalrock’s latest post about chivalry. If a very Alpha guy did something like this it would be very sweet and come across that way. When a very Beta (borderline Omega) guy like our friend does it, it just comes across as sad. The power is in the contrast.

Learning Game From Small Children

We recently had a party for my son’s first birthday. Let me tell you, the kid has some tight Game. Amazing. I learn stuff from him all the time.

He spent the evening ignoring his two year old cousin. By the end of it, she was following him around like a puppy and giving him raspberries (the food, not the stuck out tongue).

My sister-in-law has been (over the phone) jealous and annoyed because our son is significantly more advanced than her daughter was at that age (he’s walking several months before she was). At the party, she was wrapped around his finger.

My other sister-in-law (the twat waffle) spent the whole evening trying to make her son the center of attention. Our boy ignored her, the entire time. By the end of the evening she was drooling over him and gushing about how cute and adorable he is (despite still refusing to truly join the party).